Terrorist: Walid Salihi, who was shot dead attacking a police station in Paris, had been arrested for sexual assault in Cologne, Germany

The Syrian man shot dead by French police last week may have taken part in the sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year's Eve.

ISIS supporter Walid Salihi, believed to be in his late teens or early 20s, was arrested in 2014 in Cologne for sexually abusing women in a night club.

Salihi is said to have 'rubbed the behinds of females' and touched their 'intimate parts,' according to a German police report.

A friend of Salihi was arrested after the Cologne mass attacks, where hundreds of women were sexually assaulted, leading to suspicion that he may have been part of the mob on New Years Eve before travelling to France, Bild newspaper reports.

Salihi was shot dead when he tried to enter the police station in Barbes, northern Paris, shouting 'Allahu Akbar' and threatening officers with a knife on the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

He was later found to have carried a fake bomb vest and a piece of paper where he pledged allegiance to ISIS.

German authorities have confirmed the Salihi lived in a centre for asylum seekers in Recklinghausen, some 60 miles north of Cologne, where police found he used seven aliases.

'We don't know who the man really is,' said Uwe Jacob, director of the local state criminal office probing his background and movements in Europe.

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Officially he is registered as Walid Salihi, 18, who was seeking asylum seeker in Germany. In France he said he was 20, Moroccan and called Tarek Belgacem. He also pretended in turn to be a Georgian and a Tunisian.

Police initially identified him as Sallah Ali, born in 1995 in Casablanca, Morocco, a homeless man who was arrested for theft in the Var region of southern France in 2013.

He had been apprehended by police three times during his short time in Germany. He sat in police cells for drug possession, causing bodily harm, threats, thefts and unlawful weapons possession.

A former friend of Salihi was arrested after the Cologne mass attacks on New Years Eve, where hundreds of women were sexually assaulted, leading to suspicion that he may have been part of the mob

German authorities have confirmed the Salihi lived in a centre for asylum seekers in Recklinghausen, some 60 miles north of Cologne, where police found he used seven aliases.

Salihi was shot dead when he tried to enter the police station i Paris on the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attack and was found wearing a fake bomb vest and a piece of paper where he pledged allegiance to ISIS

A man who shared a room with him in an asylum home told Germany's Bild newspaper: 'He became aggressive very quickly, especially when it came to matters of religious belief.

'All non-believers were 'worthless' to him and had to die.' But using his various aliases he managed to avoid being deported.

On 31 January 2011 he registered as an asylum seeker in Romania, on April 8 that year, in Austria. On October 14 the same year in Italy and on January 8 2013 in Switzerland.

On the 7 January 2014 he registered in Germany and the following month again in Romania. On March 17 last year he registered in Sweden and in August in Germany again, in Recklinghausen.

'It is entirely unclear why he was not rumbled by authorities sooner,' said the Bild newspaper. 'For every offence and for every registration he was fingerprinted.'

Mob violence: More than 500 criminal complains have now been filed over the events outside Cologne's famous cathedral on New Years Eve, where young women were sexually assaulted, raped and robbed

The assaults on women in Cologne and other German cities
have prompted more than 600 criminal complaints, with the police
investigation focusing on asylum seekers and migrants.

The assaults, ranging from theft to sexual molestation, have
prompted a highly charged debate in Germany about Chancellor
Angela Merkel's open-door policy on refugees and migrants, more
than one million of whom entered the country last year.

Today, the minister for North Rhine-Westphalia, the German state where Cologne is located, admitted that people of foreign descent were responsible for virtually all of the violence on New Year's Eve in the city.

'Based on testimony from witnesses, the report from the Cologne police and descriptions by the federal police, it looks as if people with a migration background were almost exclusively responsible for the criminal acts,' Ralf Jaeger, interior minister from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia told a special commission on the Cologne violence.

'All signs point to these being north Africans and people from the Arab world,' he added. 'Based on what we know now from the investigation, asylum seekers who arrived in the past year are among the suspects.'